Oak Duke: Learn about deer by tracking them in the snow

Wednesday

Feb 5, 2014 at 3:28 PMFeb 5, 2014 at 3:28 PM

By Oak DukeMore Content Now

Snow gives those of us who are fascinated by the whitetail deer a window into their behavior. Without the white stuff, we would only have fragmentary glimpses into their lives.But with it, when it settles fresh on the forest floor and adjacent fields, deer write their story on a new piece of paper for us to read.It’s a true story. But where we have to read, understanding is not just handed to us. There are exaggerations, understatements, mistakes and incomprehension to trip us up. Matter of fact, I think deer invented it.When a whitetail walks, they put their back foot into the track of the front hoof. So, when we see tracks, they are almost always a combination track of the back hoof and the front hoof, unless they are running. As a whitetail runs, it pushes its back feet ahead of the front feet.A very common exaggeration in the snow is that over time, a track widens, especially if there is a slight thaw. Tracks get bigger.Sometimes a small deer will leave a track the size of a heifer if that mark in the snow is allowed to freeze overnight and then thaw a bit during the day. It’s ironic how proportionately the track may open up, with little distortion. It just gets bigger.Another exaggeration in the size of a deer track is determined by the speed of the animal. The faster a whitetail moves, the longer the track. When a deer is picking its way along, slowly browsing on twigs, shriveled leaves and exposed clumps of grass, the tracks are dainty. The animal is up on its toes.But when it decides to run a bit, the hoof becomes splayed and its dew claws — actually toes which are up on the back of its legs above the hoof — become evident in the tracks. And of course the faster the animal is moving, the deeper the track.We may like to imagine a large animal making a deeper track. But all things being equal, the whitetail which is loping along to catch up with its buddies will splay its hoof, making a bigger impression, even though it may be of identical weight or even have slightly smaller body size!Many times we fail to see or realize the significance of what we read in the snow. And then, once in a while, it will hit us like a bolt out of the blue. And there it is. Understanding.I was tracking a lone deer. It was a big fresh track, all alone, and seemed to be moving with a singular purpose. It cried out to me that it was a buck. But sometimes we are fooled by tracks made by a big, lone doe.Many times I “back track” a deer, trying to decipher as much as I can about those few moments in its life by reading back into the past.But this time I tracked it along as it walked, seeing where it was going instead of where it had been.Suddenly, the tracks veered slightly to the right, and came up behind a dense stand of poplar trees on the edge of an old goldenrod field. It was evident that the deer had stopped, stood for a moment, shifted back and forth in the same place, then whirled and bolted back down the trail, parallel to the way it had recently come.Obviously the animal had spooked.Why?I walked about 50 yards further and found the answer. A heavily beaten snowmobile trail, but not used for at least a day (I could tell from the dusting of snow) had spooked the whitetail. Often deer are not the least afraid of snowmobiles or their tracks. In fact they often use the snowmobile trails as paths for ease of walking.But this deer was evidently out of his area and smelled the “wall” of residual human scent along the sleds’ trail and it signaled danger to this deer. The next deer it may not.It’s very easy to get mixed up when attempting to follow a deer because they seem to always cross another’s tracks in a short distance. And then we have to decipher which track is “ours.” And to make it even more difficult, deer seem to like to walk down the same trails and feed under the same bush.Unraveling the thread of the trail becomes all but impossible sometimes. I find it’s best to give up unless we are absolutely sure. Mistakes are so easy to make. We can easily leap to conclusions when the evident empirical evidence is woven together on a whitetail’s track. “Many a beautiful theory has been ruthlessly murdered by a gang of facts,” to paraphrase.Some buck tracks can be distinguished from doe tracks. The average doe does not grow much larger past her third year of age, while bucks continually grow in size up to six or more years.A large buck, especially when rutting, will leave a distinct track, often dragging its toes with a tendency to toe out slightly. Does’ and smaller bucks’ tracks appear to be more “lined up” as they walk.But sometimes the deer track in the snow will lead us to a point of incomprehension and we can’t figure them out.The tracks may lead us to the edge of our knowledge, the edge of the windswept field in the snow.And once in a while we can get lucky and find a shed antler, the whitetail dropped along the way as we follow the tracks in the snow.Oak Duke writes a weekly outdoors column for the Evening Tribune in Hornell, N.Y.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.